“JC Penney’s stock tumbled 8% Friday in premarket trading, after the department store posted a $203 million loss for the third quarter,” Hibah Yousuf reports for CNN Money.

“The retailer continues to struggle amid a massive overhaul effort. JC Penney’s loss amounted to 93 cents a share for the quarter, more than thirteen times worse than what analysts were expecting,” Yousuf reports. “And sales at stores open at least a year declined more than 26% , the most since CEO Ron Johnson took the helm a year ago. The company’s total sales of $2.9 billion were also well below consensus expectations.”

Yousuf reports, “‘Today, JCP is really a tale of two companies,’ said Johnson in a statement. ‘By far the largest part of our store is the old JC Penney, which continues to struggle and experience significant challenges as evidenced by our third quarter results. However, the new JCP, centered around the shop concept, is gaining traction with customers every day and is surpassing our own expectations in terms of sales productivity which continues to give us confidence in our long term business model.'”

Johnston’s comments were revealing. He said the new concept stores were doing better than expected and that it was the old style stores that were dragging sales down.
That may be spin but his ideas could be working.
Of course it would be great to have him back at Apple but it would seem JCP is still a work in progress.

They have over 1100 stores. It doesn’t make sense to change all the stores and then find out the approach doesn’t work. I imagine that Johnston tested the new format in several geographies before deciding to expand.
The guy started in June 2011. Changing an organization that large takes time.
I’m not saying he has been successful but from the conference call he is claiming the new approach is working.

“I have been doing a quite a bit of research on JCP. From what I can tell customers seem to prefer the old stores to the new ones.”

Care to share the source of that research?
I say that because EVERYTHING I have seen, says just the opposite (up to and including the new concept “brand” departments (store in a store) which seem to produce the highest $/Sq’ even when retrofitted into existing, un-renovated, locations)